Sex Racket Busted at Rohini Spa; 6 Minor Girls Rescued
New Delhi: Six minor girls aged between 14 and 17 years were rescued from a spa centre inside a mall in Rohini, where they were being forced into prostitution. Acting on information received by the NGO Association of Voluntary Action (AVA), the Joint Commissioner of Police, Northern Range, initiated a joint raid with the Special Staff, Rohini, supported by teams from NGOs AVA and Bal Vikas Dhara. Three customers and one staff member of the spa were arrested, and five adult women were also rescued. The FIR is currently being registered at the South Rohini Police Station.
The rescued girls, originally from Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, told officials that they had applied for the spa job through an online portal called ‘Work India’. During verification, one girl who claimed to be over 18 was found carrying multiple Aadhaar cards and is suspected to be from Bangladesh, raising concerns about an international trafficking network operating through such establishments. In recent years, many vulnerable children from Bihar, Jharkhand, the North East, West Bengal, as well as neighbouring countries have been trafficked to metro cities and pushed into such sex rackets.
During their preliminary research, members of the Association for Voluntary Action had uncovered that an illegal sex racket was operating inside the ‘Crystal Beauty Spa Centre’ in Mangalam Palace, where minor girls were trafficked from neighbouring states and forced into prostitution. The team found that one of the pimps at the spa openly demanded ₹7,500 to “provide” three minor girls. AVA immediately alerted Vijay Singh, Joint Commissioner of Police, Northern Range, who responded without delay and initiated the raid.
“When the team reached the spa, the staff locked the centre from inside and refused to open it. After knocking repeatedly for almost half an hour, we finally had to cut through the lock to enter,” said an AVA team member who was part of the raid. Once inside, the team found all the girls and women huddled together in one room, while condom packets and alcohol bottles lay scattered in another.
Speaking about the process and coordination, Manish Sharma, Senior Director, Association for Voluntary Action, said, “Mr. Vijay Singh’s swift and strategic action shows what is possible when the system works with conviction. But the same urgency does not always reach the lower ranks. Trafficking and such rackets will not be dismantled by isolated acts of efficiency. Every officer, at every level, must show the same commitment to protecting children. Real change will come only when this urgency becomes the norm, not the exception.” Association for Voluntary Action is a partner of Just Rights for Children which is the country’s largest network of over 250 NGOs working for child protection in 451 districts across the country.
